This piece is part of a Crikey Deep Dive series: “What is the ABC For?”. We’re trying to unravel and distill some of the crucial questions the ABC should be asking itself in this post-Guthrie/Milne era.

It is something of an article of faith on the right of politics that the greatest problem with the ABC is its bias against the right of politics generally, and the conservative wing of the right in particular. Yet there is a risk that this unrelenting focus on the issue of minimisation of conservative ideas has allowed a potentially larger issue to escape debate.